23 December 2012

Fake Picassos

In an interview with Reinhold Schiller in 1974, Jewish, American, Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff retells a story published in the New Yorker some years before:

A man was trying to sell a painting by Picasso, and the Man whom he was trying to sell it to looked at it and after a while said, "It's a fake." The man said, "A fake?" The seller said, "Look, I'm a friend of Picasso's. Let's go up there and ask him." So they took the painting, and went up to Picasso who looked at it, and said, "It's a fake." So the man who was trying to sell the painting said, "Why, I saw you paint it myself! I was in the studio when you were painting it!" Picasso says, "Well, so what? I've painted lots of fake Picassos!"

Reznikoff laughed and said:

And I can see that's true of writing, in a sense. People write, they write their best, they think they've done something very well, but it isn't as good as some of the other things they've done.